Many organizations spend a lot of money and time to study the performance of their offered applications running on computerized systems. Determining the quality level of a system performance is important both for long-run planning of better systems and for addressing imminent impediments on the performance as they occur, in order to remove these impediments immediately and prevent further degradation of service.
For example, LoadRunner, commercially available from Hewlett Packard (HP), is an automated performance and load testing product for examining system behavior and performance, which involves generating an actual load on the application under test (AUT). LoadRunner can emulate a multitude of concurrent users to put the AUT through the rigors of real-life user loads, while collecting information from key infrastructure components (Web servers, database servers etc.). The results may then be analyzed in detail, to explore the reasons for particular behavior.
When determining system performance, it is sometimes desired to estimate server response time, distinguishing between calculation time and communication time.